It’s spring, and the 17 year cicadas are coming soon. It’s going to be a noisy June!

I recently showed my installation, “Singing Room for a Shy Person”, at the Clocktower Gallery in New York. Singing Room was commissioned by the Métamatic Research Initiative, and I’d been working on it for more than two years! It’s moving to the Tinguely Museum in Basel this Fall, along with all the other Métamatic commissioned works – if you happen to be in the area between October and February, please check it out! Here’s some more info about the thing:

http://artonair.org/residency/ranjit-bhatnagar-singing-room-for-a-shy-person
http://hyperallergic.com/70273/singing-for-shy-people-with-voice-activated-instruments/

I’ve got two big projects coming up next! First, in a few weeks, I’m going to Paris to meet up with a bunch of artists, architects, builders, and musicians to build CONCERT HALL – a sound sculpture shipwreck, a big walk-through experience made from salvaged materials and robotic instruments, and we kind of need your help to make it work. It’s opening next month at one of the largest contemporary art centers in Europe: the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Even though this is a huge museum, they are opening twenty exhibitions all at once as part of their Nouvelles Vagues programming, and museum budgets being what they are, they weren’t able to offer us the full budget they had initially discussed.

Here’s a concept rendering of the thing:

We have been attempting to raise an extra $7000 through Rockethub, which is realistically the amount we need. As of now, we have 2 days left and it doesn’t look too likely that we’ll make it to that amount. However, with Rockethub, unlike Kickstarter, it is not all or nothing. Every little bit will help, and if we can make it to the half-way point, we at least know we’ll be able to provide for ourselves in terms of lodging and groceries during our stay in Paris. I know many of you have given already – thank you! It has not gone unnoticed, and we appreciate it!

Others, if you can spare just $10 each, it will really help us make this ambitious project possible. Please contribute if you’re intrigued – note that we’ve got some neat gifts for contributors!

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/25362-concert-hall

The other big project, which I’m just as excited about, is the revival of SiSSYFiGHT 2000, the online multiplayer game I helped make way back in the late ’90s! It was a weird, disturbing, and fun game that had a lot of enthusiastic fans until we had to close it down a few years ago. Now we’ve raised money on kickstarter to rewrite the game in modern web technologies and give it all away as open source code. We’ve made our funding goal, but if you’d like to kick in a few bucks to reserve your SiSSYFiGHT username, or to help us reach our stretch goals, or to get some fun prizes, we’d be grateful!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1805029723/sissyfight-2000-returns

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I always love hearing what you are up to – please keep in touch. You know how to reach me! Feel free to add me to your own announcement lists if you use such things.